Bernardo Torres

I love solving customer's problems.

I've made a career as a software developer, having switched in the last years as an engineering lead, currently Head of Engineer, leading multiple teams and contexts.

My focus before was creating solutions through code, my goal now is to create an environment where developers can autonomously create value for customers.

There are a couple of principles that help me achieving that:

• Exploring opportunities, designing solutions and conduting experiments to validate these solutions to achieve business outcomes;
• Giving the why and what and supporting the team figuring out the how;
• Autonomy and accountability go together;
• Continuous small iterations versus Big Bang changes;
• Decreasing Mean Time To Recovery instead of targeting 100% stability;
• Team ownership - You design it, you build it, you run it, you own it;
• Team leadership is accountable for decisions;
• Teams should own a specific business part of the product, end-to-end;
• Investments in continuous integration and continuous deployment pay off in developer productivity;
• Decisions should be driven by data, concrete arguments and by the developing team instead of being based on anecdotal experience.
• Develop in-house for the core domain, acquire for everything else;

These principles are not absolute, but good guidelines when making decisions.

Personally I enjoy:

• Organising work around smart people;
• Driving initiatives forward;
• Creating process where it makes sense to give reliable and repeatable results;
• Foster the opportunities for people to grow on their career;
• Support different views on the same topic to arrive to the best decision.

Books I recommend: